2027 Paris Residency Fellows

We are delighted to announce our four Curtis Artist Fellows and two inaugural Virginia Spate Fellows who will be travelling to Paris in 2027.

Curtis Artist Fellows:

• Betty Sargeant

• James Nguyen

• Joel Sherwood Spring

• Ken and Julia Yonetani.

Virginia Spate Fellows:

• Will Visconti

• Suzannah Henty

The six were selected by an expert panel that included Power Institute Director Professor Mark Ledbury, Professor Daniel Browning, Dr Alex Gawronski, and Associate Professor Donna Brett. This year the panel's task was especially difficult: we experienced a huge swell of interest in the Fellowships, receiving our highest ever number of applications. 

Below you can learn more about each of our Fellows, and the projects they have planned for Paris in 2027.

The Power Institute is deeply grateful to Nick and Angela Curtis for their generous philanthropic support of the Nicholas and Angela Curtis Cité Internationale des Arts Residency Fellowships and Virginia Spate Research Fellowships, which provide transformative opportunities for Australian artists and researchers to engage with Paris’s vibrant cultural community.

Learn more about the Paris Residencies

Curtis Artist Fellowship Projects

Betty Sargeant

During her Cité residency Betty will analyse the intersection between early French microscope photographs of plants (biological micrographs) and contemporary visual art. Being in Paris will allow Betty to study the Laure Albin-Guillot archives at three major Parisian institutions, investigating how  Albin-Guillot's abstract biological micrographs can inform a new series of large-scale artworks built from light. The Cité residency offers Betty the uninterrupted time to turn historical research into a fully resolved, progressive body of contemporary art, expanding Albin-Guillot’s innovations, and refining her creative practice: transforming micro layers of life into nuanced, sophisticated macro-scale light installations.

James Nguyen

While in Paris, James will research the records of the Institut Pasteur and other medical archives in Paris to develop a short documentary film on the dermatological history of his family. From the impact of Tropical Leper Colonies to the deployment of chemical weapons across Indochina, the work traces the clinical manifestations of skin eruptions that still persists in the artists’ own skin.  

The project begins with the artist’s aunt Sœur Hương entering the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary at Quy Hòa, the last remaining Leper Colony in Vietnam. Her commitment to those suffering from leprosy stem from the loss of a family member to the skin arrests ‘da vây’ during the French colonial era in the summer of 1933. 

Joel Spring

Joel’s project is an experimental ‘game’ designed in collaboration with Akil Ahamat. Using the roleplaying game form, combining simulation and genre fiction into semi-improvised group storytelling, in which participants generate plot, dialogue and performance together. 
'Mining' in its many formulations and the holes produced by mining are the subject and process for this project. What if the stories about the building of our worlds began with who and what is made to disappear in the process?  
By folding political metaphor and imagined worlds into gameplay. The game explores what it is to be in, and of the earth: taking seriously how ‘The Earth’ conditions thought and how thoughts form the concepts of ‘worlds’, on and beyond the earth. Because digging is never simple, what comes from below carries an excess that is hard to define, contain or control.

Julia and Ken Yonetani

Ken and Julia Yonetani will undertake research and production for a new work, The Republic of Things. While inspired by the tradition of cabinets of curiosities, the project is also a critique and humorous play upon it, as a historical collection produced in an imaginary future. This is an extension of their previous work, The Ruins of Tomorrow (2024). However, in this new work, the imagined future is not a story of civilization decline, but rather an envisaged utopian society where humans and non-humans have established a state of being in which the divide between nature and society is abolished, as conceived by the French philosopher Bruno Latour in what he termed the “Republic of Things.”  

Virginia Spate Research Fellowship Projects

Will Visconti

Will's time in Paris will allow him to continue work on his monograph entitled The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Urban Sex Work: A Transnational Study. This project examines how sex workers were at the vanguard of adopting new technologies and influencing material culture in Paris, as a globally-recognised hub of material culture and innovation in design. Comparison to other cities like London and Melbourne, and where they saw Paris as a rival or an inspiration, are also pertinent. Will's project demonstrates sex workers' active participation in shaping culture, challenging assumptions that sex workers were passive consumers or simply copied trends set by urban elites. Its scope encompasses fashion, visual representation through photography and media culture, interiors and architecture, and the engagement with urban space between the Second Empire and First World War.

Suzannah Henty

Suzannah's project sets out to contour the institutional footprint of the Aboriginal Arts Board in Paris between 1973 and 1990, and to trace its legacy in Australian cultural policy abroad today. It will address a current gap in art historical and institutional knowledge by offering to scholarship on Australian art new insights into the radical work of the AAB abroad. Beginning with the Australian Embassy’s collection of twenty-six bark paintings that represent Bininj and Yolŋu artists from Maningrida, Gunbalanya and Yirrkala, this project works outward to trace Indigenous artworks entering public collections in Paris during the years the AAB was active.